Occupy Wall Street
- Thread starter ymu
- Start date
the button
out on the kocker
"We're not anti-semites, that could be any hook-nosed man in a big hat." 
8ball
Decolonise colons!
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Exactly."We're not anti-semites, that could be any hook-nosed man in a big hat."
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Apparently the facebook site gives the same explanation as the tampa incident referred to above - not us 'guv, just someone using the name. Not being on facebook i can't check though.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Yes.Is there still an 'Occupy movement'?
8ball
Decolonise colons!
They don't have things like official representatives etc., and since they are the 99% surely just about anyone can use the name...
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
There's no need for official *anything*.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
I thought they were morphing into something else since there doesn't seem to be much occupying going on.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
In terms of occupying, it depends where you're looking I suppose. You haven't seen the V masks at demos? You haven't heard about the planned 5 Nov action? EtcI thought they were morphing into something else since there doesn't seem to be much occupying going on.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
I've seen the V masks (less so recently). Anonymous like those too. And naughty teenagers.
What's happening on Nov 5th? Are they going to blow up the Houses of Parliament?
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
If you have a look on the Oct 20 thread there's reference to it. I keep a clear distance from Occupy myself, so don't look to me for more than a few pithy comments.
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Fair enough. I'm at the uppermost peak of my 'cynicism and despair' cycle at the moment - would be nice if they were up to something more constructive than wandering about in silly masks and muttering conspiracy theories about the Jooz.
So I'll stay away from the Oct 20 thread to avoid depressing myself further...
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Have a look at DPAC, UK Uncut and Solfed for some examples of direct action untainted by conspiracy theorists, if you'd like some more positive stuff to lighten your mood.
jeff_leigh
What happened to Dubversion ?
.
Treacle Toes
Time
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/power-to-the-people/Power to the People
11.3.12
by Sarah Jaffe
Occupy’s afterlife — a dispatch from New York’s dark zones
(Jeremy Zilar / Flickr)
New York’s inequality is not a secret to anyone who walks its streets, let alone struggles to pay its rents. Our billionaire mayor seemed to be out to prove a point this week, acting like a petulant child when public opinion pushed him to cancel the New York City Marathon this weekend, while people still have no power, food, and in too many cases lost everything in floods or fires.
For those of us who’ve spent the last few years covering the struggles of everyday people against the financial and corporate giants who’ve consolidated wealth to unheard-of levels, this week has been an exercise in “Where the hell have you been?” After Hurricane Katrina, which I watched from hundreds of miles away, people declared over and over “It’s like a third world country.”
Those of us who’d lived in and loved that city didn’t need a storm to tell us what it was like.
The comparisons to Katrina have been everywhere, of course, but for me they hit home when, safe in my Crown Heights apartment that never even lost power, I saw friends and acquaintances who’d been involved with Occupy Wall Street tweeting their relief activities under the hashtag #OccupySandy. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched them tweet their setup of a hub in Red Hook, of Common Ground, of Malik Rahim, of New Orleans’ mutual aid after the storm, and how leftists and radicals (Rahim, a former Black Panther, learned about community care from the Panthers’ free food and tutoring programs) step quietly into the spaces that are left vacant by the wrecking crew that’s laid waste to social welfare programs and the churches and charities that Republicans keep telling us will step up to provide care.
Julieta Salgado, a Brooklyn College student and organizer, told me that it started with a text message from a handful of folks working with the Free University, Tuesday after the storm had passed. That group wound up at the Red Hook Initiative, and from there fanned out into the streets of wealthy, dry Carroll Gardens seeking donations. “We just walked from door to door and every single person responded, no one turned us down,” Salgado said. “People were thanking us for coming. I think we gave an entryway to some folks who didn’t know how to help.”
There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks.
Just after Thomas Frank declared Occupy dead, killed by its own fascination with process and language, I walked into St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park Friday and saw so many familiar faces from Zuccotti, not sitting around debating how to talk about the revolution, but doing hard, necessary, practical work to feed and clothe and support swathes of the city reeling from the Superstorm. The obituaries of Occupy had never seemed so completely wrong; not on May Day or September 17th when the streets again rang with protest.
The church basement was filled with volunteers standing around tables, some preparing food, some sorting donations and putting together boxes, like the Kitchen and Comfort stations from the best days at the park. All would be fed. All would be clothed. Except instead of waiting for those in need to arrive, curious, at the park and make their way past the cardboard protest signs to the heart of the occupation, these volunteers now were loading cars filled with precious gasoline to drive to Coney Island, to the Rockaways, to anywhere that people weren’t being cared for.
“It’s amazing how organized we are, it’s amazing how much so many people involved with the social movement have learned about themselves, about each other, about all of how, how to put these values into practice,” Michael Premo, one of the Occupy organizers in Sunset Park, told me.
In Red Hook earlier I’d seen lines around the block for food, diapers, blankets, flashlights, water, as the Red Hook Initiative/Occupy Sandy effort had expanded to more buildings, separated its hot food distribution from the place to get supplies to take home. The public housing all around us was still powerless and cold, but there were so many volunteers that they didn’t know what to do with us all. Salgado showed back up the next day and saw two people whose doors she’d knocked on the night before, there to help.
For those of us who had power and Internet access, of course, the political emails kept coming, of course, because Sandy had the temerity to hit the East Coast right before a bloated hellstorm of an election. I tweeted about some of the ones that seemed in the poorest taste; who sends an email with the subject “close call” in the days after a hurricane if you’re not talking about the storm?
I got at least one apology when I pointed out that perhaps what Staten Island needs at the moment is not Democratic doorknockers, but volunteers to help clear the wreckage and feed and clothe people who have just lost everything, but what seemed entirely lost is the long tradition of service provision as political organizing.
Just ask the community groups who jumped into action for Sandy, the organizers who make their (meager) living providing services to people facing foreclosure, to immigrant workers fighting wage theft, to neighborhoods trying to keep out the corporate-backed charter schools. At 1pm I dropped off two bags of clothing at the New York Communities for Change offices in downtown Brooklyn, walking past gas cans filled last night in Connecticut by volunteers to make sure the cars kept going out to the Rockaways, to Long Island; at 11pm I said goodnight to an organizer going back to sleep in his office to start again tomorrow.
Because political organizing and mutual aid go hand in hand, or they should. Because the early labor movement wasn’t just about organizing on the job but organizing in your neighborhood. Because the folks still trying to build an anticapitalist movement in this country know that you can’t organize with shell-shocked people until their basic needs have been met.
Of course, Common Ground was infiltrated, because solidarity is suspect; you can bet that if these pesky Occupy activists keep feeding and supporting and organizing in communities, someone will be out to break that up too. But for now, Salgado said, “The joke is so on Bloomberg. The people he spent $60 million trying to destroy, we’re the first people on the ground.”
Treacle Toes
Time
Occupy Leads Relief Efforts In Powerless Red Hook
Lining up for food at the Red Hook Initiative Center.
As the lights come back on in lower Manhattan, the power imbalance in parts of the city worst hit by Sandy is more literal than ever. Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens were able to celebrate Halloween as usual, but just blocks away, many residents of the Red Hook Houses, the city’s second-largest housing project, are without electricity, heat, or running water, and growing increasingly desperate. Red Hook, like other areas with overheard power lines, could wait another ten days or longer for juice, according to Con Edison. So far, Red Hook has received little help from the city or FEMA, and a team of Occupy protestors have been heading relief efforts.
“I can’t take this no more,” said Alisa Pizarro on Friday, wiping tears from her eyes. The lead community organizer at Red Hook Initiative Center on Hicks Street, which has become a hub for relief efforts, she is also a resident. “It’s too much. We have no light. We have no water. We have nothing. I’ve been washing with a little bottle of water. You hear stories about people looting other people’s apartments. I have pepper spray in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I don’t want to go through another night.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/occupy-leads-relief-in-powerless-red-hook.html
Treacle Toes
Time
Action
By sean mcalpin
Most conflicts we face today have existing in one form or another since the beginning of humans:-
-community vs. the individual;
-needs of the group (society) vs. the freedom of the person;
-although capitalism intensifies them, class divisions have existed for thousands of years before capitalism in its present form;
-the personal emotional solace religion provides many vs. the horrors and lies it has perpetrated throughout history and harsh judgmental attitudes some religionists nurture.
Countless people have fought and died in an effort to eliminate these conflicts, yet they remain. No sound-bites, no fb posters, no rash emotional responses, no hyper-intellectual books and theorems can solve the problems our world has had for millennia. Yet when faced with injustice what does the single person do? Stand up! For each of us are part of this unfolding story. All the thoughts, history, narrative, theory, and understanding, can melt away in one instant when faced with the reality of experience. The reality of standing up and taking action. Action is what has created this world from the beginning. Movement in space and time.
http://seanmcalpin.com/2012/11/04/action/
Treacle Toes
Time
Naomi Klein @NaomiAKlein
Goldman Sachs Building Is Bright, but Occupy Shines | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/170955/occupy-alive …
Goldman Sachs Building Is Bright, but Occupy Shines | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/170955/occupy-alive …
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
It's not like this suff is new, right at the beginning of the Occupy London thread a number of us were pointing out that the Occupy movement had a significant number of ant-semites/loons/idiots in it.
Treacle Toes
Time
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
my experience is similar. and there was a real problem with challenging idiotic ideas. which drove sensible people away and left a load of people who thought jews did 911, the biggest problem facing society is the queen's lizard ancestry, and that if we just did away with fractional reserve banking (and
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Someone did a thing on the Twitter, apparently.
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